Many organisations and industries use management systems, standards and frameworks to enable management to specify and achieve a number of key effectiveness, efficiency and/or compliance objectives. An organisation may seek compliance with ISO9001/2000, or some other standard, framework or internally defined requirement, such as a process or a work instruction. At a production monitoring and control level an industrial manufacturing process may seek compliance with a quality management system in which a plurality of predefined production protocols have to be followed in order to achieve a consistent product specification or performance, or to maximise the profitability, effectiveness or other objective of a manufacturing or commercial process.
Traditionally, once the manner of the delivery of a requirement has been devised and its implementation laid down, normally as a range or sequence of processes or procedures to be carried out by a workforce, the monitoring of the organisation or the production control in order to assess compliance with those processes or procedures is by a manual survey or audit. There is no meaningful or consistent cross-correlation between the results of that survey/audit and other aspects or requirements of the industrial or commercial process, such as a set of relevant Performance Drivers or Indicators. Such assessment of the organisation's defined requirements has not previously been automatically or consistently carried out, analysed and reported as it has not been technically feasible to achieve this, mainly because of the different skills, competence, experience, perceptions and attitude of the people involved and the lack of the existence of any tools for the consistent collection of adequate in-depth evidence or data. The result has been that these audits/surveys have always been simply to assess compliance with the target standard, the framework or the internally defined requirement, in the expectation that improvement or maintenance of production and other organisational targets will follow as measured, for instance, by turnover, quality or profitability of the manufacturing process or of the industrial or commercial organisation. Current methods that purport to do this do not apply the rigour of the invention to all parts of the process used, even though some elements may appear to provide consistency of approach (e.g. the consistent use of a spreadsheet that is populated with numbers, which are assessed rather then consistently created, leads to reduced value and both a perception and possible reality of inaccuracy of the output).